The Numerical Electromagnetics Code (NEC) - A Brief History

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The Numerical Electromagnetics Code, NEC as it is commonly known, continues to be one of the more widely used antenna modeling codes in existence. With several versions in use that reflect different levels of capability and availability, there are now 450 copies of NEC4 and 250 copies of NEC3 that have been distributed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to a limited class of qualified recipients, and several hundred copies of NEC2 that had a recorded distribution by LLNL. These numbers do not account for numerous copies (perhaps 1000s) that were acquired through other means capitalizing on the open source code, ...
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Description

The Numerical Electromagnetics Code, NEC as it is commonly known, continues to be one of the more widely used antenna modeling codes in existence. With several versions in use that reflect different levels of capability and availability, there are now 450 copies of NEC4 and 250 copies of NEC3 that have been distributed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to a limited class of qualified recipients, and several hundred copies of NEC2 that had a recorded distribution by LLNL. These numbers do not account for numerous copies (perhaps 1000s) that were acquired through other means capitalizing on the open source code, the absence of distribution controls prior to NEC3 and the availability of versions on the Internet. In this paper we briefly review the history of the code that is concisely displayed in Figure 1. We will show how it capitalized on the research of prominent contributors in the early days of computational electromagnetics, how a combination of events led to the tri-service-supported code development program that ultimately led to NEC and how it evolved to the present day product. The authors apologize that space limitations do not allow us to provide a list of references or to acknowledge the numerous contributors to the code both of which can be found in the code documents.

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